Somebody should be making money. Check out this story on PacBell. They're my carrier. They are swarmed with high speed orders and only a tiny fraction of the state is currently affected. Hope BA can kick it gear.
Hiring fever fires up telecom
Sevice: Pac Bell, TCI battle to beef up staff to meet customer demand.
BY DEBORAH KONG
Mercury News Staff Writer
Scrambling to keep up with California's thirst for additional phone lines and high-speed Internet access, Pacific Bell plans to hire 1,800 new workers in the next six months -- 900 of them in the Bay Area, a top official said Monday.
It may not be easy to find them, though. In the competitive Silicon Valley telecommunications industry, scores of companies are vying to hire qualified customer service representatives and service technicians.
Tele-Communications Inc., the Bay Area's dominant cable TV provider, also plans to hire 800 to 900 employees in the Bay Area this year to keep up with the growth of its business, said spokesman Andrew Johnson.
The two companies are battling for residential customers willing to pay between $40 and $50 a month for high-speed Internet connections. AT&T Corp., which is buying TCI, also is taking aim at Pac Bell's local telephone service. It plans a trial of its own phone-over-cable service in Fremont this year.
How long customers wait on hold, when they get that second phone line or cable service installed and how quickly they receive high-speed Internet access will depend on how successful TCI and Pac Bell are in meeting their hiring goals.
''In today's competitive market, service will make the difference when customers choose a telecommunications provider,'' Ed Whitacre, chairman and chief executive of Pac Bell's parent company SBC Communications, told a Los Angeles business forum during a speech on the company's future.
Hiring targets
The new hires will bring the number of California employees to almost 56,000 -- up from a low of about 45,000 in 1996. That's still well below the level of 15 years ago, when AT&T was split up, creating regional telephone companies like Pacific Bell.
In the Bay Area, Pac Bell is looking for 400 service representatives to answer customers' calls about establishing service or reporting problems; 200 operators to provide directory assistance service and about 330 service technicians to visit customers' homes to perform installations and repairs.
The company also sends technicians to customers' homes to set up high-speed Internet service.
Salaries, excluding overtime, range from $18,460 to $40,000 a year for service representatives; for technicians the range is from $19,240 to $47,000.
''It is harder to hire people in the Silicon Valley,'' said Pac Bell spokesman John Britton. ''There's tremendous competition for these workers.''
Since the beginning of the year, Pac Bell has added about 1,800 new employees to keep up with demand. Customers are asking for numerous second lines for Internet access, home offices and teenage users. The number of lines installed statewide increased from 360,000 in 1995 to 750,000 in the first nine months of 1998.
TCI is also seeking installers, technicians and customer service representatives that it will use to possibly expand installation hours to evenings and weekends, and more quickly deploy high-speed Internet service in areas where cable networks have been upgraded.
''I imagine both of us face the same situation,'' TCI's Johnson said of Pac Bell. ''You spend a significant amount of time and effort and money just trying to recruit good people. You get them trained and inevitably, as we've seen in the South Bay in particular, a software company will come along'' and offer a job.
High-speed need
Charles Carbone of the Utility Consumers' Action Network said he hopes Pac Bell's hiring plans will speed the availability of its high-speed data services.
''What they are trying to do in a long overdue fashion is to play catch-up and match the real demand of the market,'' Carbone said. ''If people are being hired to address those problems it's long overdue and we're glad to see it.''
Union vice president Bill Quirk said he is encouraged by the hiring. ''It's usually good for job security for our members,'' said Quirk, whose Communications Workers of America represents about 80,000 workers in California, Hawaii and Nevada.
Pac Bell officials said the company's investments have reduced complaints about delays in installation, repairs and other telephone services.
Last week, the state's Public Utilities Commission released a report on customer complaints about telephone service showing that the Bay Area ranked tops in the state, representing half of all complaints received by the commission's consumer affairs branch in 1998. The number of Bay Area complaints fell from 696 in 1997 to 302 in 1998.
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